Tangled threads

Women Beware Women
Olivier, in rep until 4 July

Hair
Gielgud, booking until January 2011

Women Beware Women deserves a subtitle: spectators beware seldom revived classics. Thomas Middleton’s 1622 play is set in the duke’s court at Florence, where greed, lust, incest and the hunger for power are running rampant. Middleton is much admired, little adored. He’s one of those dramatists who sends actors, directors and literary professors into rhapsodies but who doesn’t attend to the basics of entertainment. There’s no central character in this play just a grand human theme, corruptibility. He wraps up the script in great cobwebby entanglements of interrelated storylines. In one thread we follow a character named Bianca, who starts as a demure young wife, is raped by a count, becomes his mistress and ascends from blameless gentility to a compromised position of wealth and influence. But at no point during this huge journey did I feel touched or moved by her transformation because Middleton’s grasp of character is far less certain than his knack for lyrical invention.

He subordinates every element of his play to the polished elegance of his wit, and all of his characters, even the servants, speak in exquisitely turned poetical dainties. Look at this. ‘Sin tastes, at the first draught, like wormwood water/ But drunk again ’tis nectar ever after.’ One could write quite a lengthy monograph on the gorgeous offbeat symmetries of that extraordinary couplet. The ingenious placings of ‘draught’ and ‘after’, ‘water’ and ‘nectar’ provide the ear with a pair of internal harmonies that leave the fleeting impression of rhyme but without the jangling tricksiness of a true rhyme. This is Middleton at his finest and the play is best enjoyed in excerpts and fragments. It’s like a beach of pebbles.